First You Try Everything (8 page)

“Of course I loved you!”

“Loved?”

The past tense clanged like a prison door shutting,
and changed everything; the room itself was transformed by it, the bed, the
dresser, the bare floor, the window, all seeming to step back while absorbing
the word's singular power.

She finished dressing and quietly began to climb
out the window. She was almost nimble. She made her way down the ladder. She'd
left the helmet behind.

“O
h my
God! She did what?” Lauren said.

“She basically got a ladder and climbed in the
window and watched me sleep.” He couldn't tell her about the naked display, the
Lou Reed rendition, the football helmet, the whole performance.

“That's such an
invasion
, Ben!”

“I
know
.”

“I mean, weren't you shocked?”

“I was really surprised.”

Then, in Lauren's blue eyes he saw a sense of
amazement and appreciation of this so-called invasion. Or was she merely amused?
He felt a little wave of protection for Evvie move through him.

“Was she always nuts?”

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “Maybe. Not really. I
guess she was a little. Let's talk about something else.” He pulled her close.
Kissed the side of her head. He did not want to further betray Evvie by
disclosing what made her unusual. Moreover, he wanted to protect the boundaries
of this new life with this beautiful woman, who loved to have sex with him, who
was planning to teach him how to garden when summer came. This woman who
radiated a calm that seemed rooted in wisdom she'd be too humble to own. He
breathed in the scent of her shampoo.

“I could never live with a vegan,” she said. “They
all tend to be so judgmental. You must be a really tolerant person.”

He didn't take the bait except to sigh. “Not
really.”

T
hey
were walking under a lavender evening sky, down a narrow street in Erie, near
where Ben had grown up. They'd come back to visit his father and stepmother, to
introduce Lauren to them. His father had been mildly saddened when he told them
about his separation, even though both he and his stepmother had never
particularly loved Evvie. Both of them had their old-time Protestant (though
they were atheists) distrust of Catholics; they knew that Evvie descended from
people who played bingo in church basements, drank obscene amounts of liquor,
prayed rosaries in front of statues, and crippled people with guilt. Evvie, a
supposed agnostic, had one night, years ago, exploded at the dinner table when
Ben's stepmother had said something innocuously offensive about a parade for
Saint Anthony where people taped dollars onto the life-size statue of the saint
before he was hauled through the streets of Pittsburgh. They'd never seen that
explosive side of Evvie, and it eclipsed all the selves she'd displayed to them
before and after. She'd become the crazy Catholic, even though she'd apologized,
welling up with tears that made things worse. She'd explained that when she was
a little girl, parades for Saint Anthony were some of the best times of her
life, since she got to be with her grandmother, who was called an honorary
Italian by her Italian neighbors because she was so nice and loved to eat the
homemade pasta and listen to Luigi Tenco.

“Don't worry, dear,” his stepmother had said, and
his father had winked, but nothing, according to Evvie, was ever the same after
this.

Then, two years ago, when Evvie had started
preaching about factory farms, she'd lost considerable favor again, not because
they loved meat so much, or even because they disagreed that corporate farms
were hell-worlds, but her delivery was so off, her voice trembling as it rose,
that they both suspected something deeply
personal
overshadowed her conviction, making it suspect. “She should ask herself when
she
felt slaughtered. She's got a deep
identification with these animals, which points to something pretty dark,” his
father suggested.

So Ben was surprised when his father, hearing the
news, said, “I'm so sorry, Ben. I guess I figured you and Evvie would always be
together.”

“I did too,” he remembers saying.

“S
o
shall we go meet them?” he said to Lauren. They'd been walking the streets for
nearly an hour; his palms were damp with anxiety. It was Sunday, quiet and
empty.
Dead
would be the word. They'd seen only two
human beings: a fat-faced child on a bike who shouted “beep beep” and a cop on
the corner talking on a cell phone. Lauren wore a snug blue cap, faded jeans,
and a dark red jacket, black boots with heels that clicked on the sidewalk.
Every so often she did a little step-dance. Her small nose was red with cold,
and her eyes brightened each time they met his.

“You doing OK?” he asked her.

“Maybe I'm a little nervous.”

“They're pretty easygoing,” he said.
Unless you know them.

He took her hand and steered her down one street
and up another, until they stood on top of a low, stone wall with a view of the
lake, a block from the unadorned but newly repointed half-time brick home of his
last years of childhood, a place he'd mostly avoided as an adult. He held no
serious grievances anymore against any of his parents, just a discomfort in
their presence he preferred to avoid.

A green metal chair sat alone on the front
porch.

A similar chair used to adorn the back porch; early
on with Evvie, the two of them once sat there in the middle of the night,
feverishly draped around each other under a blanket. A huge deer, a buck with
full antlers, had approached them in the moonlight, and everything went still.
The deer had come so close, and this had been so thrilling, that both of them
had tears in their eyes by the time the deer turned to walk back to the
woods.

“Hey there, look who the wind blew in!”

His stepmother had short dyed red hair now, and
bright bluish eyes that seemed never to move in their sockets. If she wished to
look to the left or right, she turned her whole head, as if injured. Her smile
was broad and inviting as usual, if devoid of intimacy. The fourth-grade teacher
she'd once been was nowhere to be seen, even as her face had changed little.

“Hi, Mom, so . . . this is Lauren.”

Mom grasped Lauren's hands, squeezed once, then let
go, as was her habit. “Pleased to meet you, Lauren,” she said. The front hall
was beautiful with flowers and shining wood.

“Place looks great,” Ben said.

“That's because I shined it up for your visit, Ben.
Lauren, come sit down. Let me get you kids a Coke.” She looked at him with
detached curiosity, as if after all these years, she still couldn't figure him
out.

“Maybe we can all have a beer,” Ben suggested.
“Where's Dad?”

“He was out back tinkering with something. Let me
go call him.”

“Dad's tinkering?” Ben called. “Since when?”

Lauren and Ben sat in the living room, facing each
other like schoolchildren suddenly seized by giddiness; Lauren laughed out loud
for no reason, then clapped her hand across her mouth. “Is that you?” she said,
pointing to a photograph of a strapping six-year-old batter squinting into the
sun.

“ 'Fraid so.”

“Pretty cute!”

Evvie had held that picture, practically fallen
into it, and said,
This picture destroys me
.

Tell me everything you can
remember and I'll tell you everything I can remember. Even irrelevant stuff,
like how you drank a glass of milk one day in front of the window when some
guy across the street was cutting the grass and he stopped to wipe his brow
with a handkerchief.

“Hey, Ben!”

He got up to embrace his father, who stiffly
clapped his son on the back three times in lieu of a hug. His father was
completely bald now, and his glasses were thicker, but he was still strong
despite a potbelly making itself known under his striped polo shirt. “You'll
stay the night?” he asked, hopefully, and Lauren spoke up and said, “Yes,”
before Ben could explain they had to get back in a few hours.

“You must be Lauren,” his father said, smiling, and
Lauren stood up.

“So nice to meet you,” Lauren said. And then,
strangely, his father and Lauren embraced as if they'd known one another
forever, as if his father weren't suspicious of such displays of unearned
affection. Lauren's direct warmth could be like a high beam of blinding light; a
person couldn't see clearly in that light, basically forgot who they were.

“So do we have beer?” Ben said.

His father had remembered himself, and now looked
confused. “Beer?” he said, blinking.

“We always have beer,” said Mom. “Oh yes, we do,
can't live without our beer around here,” she added, in an abrasive singsong
that implied perhaps someone liked beer a little too much around here. He
guessed his father was drinking more these days.

“I'll get them,” Ben said. He left the room and
first walked into the backyard to shake his head, rid himself of Evvie. When she
first loved him, she'd wanted to come to Erie so as to inhabit every childhood
haunt he'd known, to draw closer to the boy he'd been. He'd taken her to the
tiny house beside the nursing home, and she'd looked into all the windows, a
detective working a crucial and endlessly mysterious case. It gave him a pang to
remember how young and alive she'd been back then, how seemingly happy, with
that walk she used to have, leaning forward on her toes—
Evvie walks like someone headed through a parking lot to hear their
favorite band in concert
, his friend Paul had said.
This girl in her twenties, the person she'd been—did she survive inside of the
woman who'd broken into his place and said his heart was black ice?

He stood in the kitchen and tried to shake it all
out of his head, like a dog shakes water out of its coat, though his resistance
to thinking of her, he knew from experience, only intensified the memories. He
would drink a beer and make small talk, his parents peppering their conversation
with names of friends Ben had never met and couldn't keep track of.

They would eat roast beef and nobody would really
miss Evvie, not exactly, not consciously, though Ben would try to hear the echo
of one of her old cow-abuse lectures to remind himself of how her presence could
darken a table, to puncture the strange and unwieldy grief rising in him. Evvie
had somehow protected him here in this house, with these parents, in a way that
Lauren could not. Not yet.

“I
t's
sad,” Lauren whispered.

“What's sad?”

“This is your home, and you're like a stranger
here.”

His stepmother had beautifully arranged the guest
room for them. She was, on some practical level, a hospitable soul. Because
Lauren was this way too, it allowed him a new appreciation for all of it: The
quilts on the mahogany sleigh bed were hand-sewn heirlooms beautifully softened
with age, the sheer curtains were embroidered with butterflies. She'd arranged
fresh blue towels on a rack, and the sheets, they saw now, climbing naked into
the old bed, were the softest, whitest dream-sheets, like silk against their
skin as they turned to each other in the dim orange glow of the night-light.

“A stranger?” He was immensely grateful for the
surprise of her perception. She'd seemed quietly oblivious at the table, and
afterward, when they'd all taken a walk to the lake.

“Don't you think?”

She rubbed his shoulders, introducing him to the
tension he must've felt all evening long. They made love, quietly, and the
silence of the room deepened around them. He squeezed her hand. “That was
nice.”

“Nice? You're amazing,” she said.

“Really?”

“You're really surprised? Your wife never let you
in on that little secret?”

“Don't call it little.”

She laughed.

He was still not completely at ease with her, which
made him feel like a pedestrian lover, too considerate, too careful. He
suspected her of flattery.

“So should I never mention her? Like she never
existed? If so, that's cool.”

He considered this for a moment. “You can mention
her.”

“Someday I'd like to get to know her.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“You could meet Carter if you wanted.”

“No, thanks.”

“Really? No curiosity?”

“I think I'll just let Carter be Carter in
Carterville.”

“OK.”

A silence fell. He tried steering his mind to more
neutral territory. The morning. They could head to a bakery before leaving town.
Eclairs. Espresso. And then a long drive down 79 with some music.

“I'd like to meet your mom.”

“Soon.”

“Are you a stranger there too?”

“No. I mean no more than any grown-up child is a
stranger in their parent's house. My mom knows how to watch football and get
high on Pepsi. She lives on a llama farm with a guy who used to be the mayor of
Indiana, Pennsylvania, and she takes life as it comes.”

“Wow. A llama farm? And you never bothered to
mention this?”

“She's only been with the mayor for three
years.”

“And she's happy?”

“She can spend ten hours in a tomato garden. Sort
of happy no matter what. And I don't understand it, since her father was
horrible.” He could never think of his mother without thinking of his
grandfather, but he stopped himself before saying more.

He'd found out who his grandfather was when he was
seven years old, staying with his grandparents while his parents went to Niagara
Falls for a long weekend. His grandfather had beaten him with a belt one night,
in a mudroom where the sound of the whirring dryer muffled the sound of his
grandfather's voice as it ordered him to strip naked. He'd tried to run out of
the room, and this had enraged the man. “I have to take you down a peg or two,”
he'd confided, twisting Ben's arm, “for your own sake.”